Russia’s senior TV presenter Vladimir Pozner condemned President Dmitry Medvedev’s idea of launching Public TV, saying it would become yet another state mouthpiece.
“There [in Medvedev’s decree] it is said that it will be up to the president to appoint the director general and chief editor. That’s it… It means not public television but just another government-controlled channel,” Pozner said.
Addressing a meeting on Tuesday over another of his projects, the Open Government, Medvedev said he had signed a bill to set up Public TV, which would hit the air waves from January 2013.
Pozner, who is also known in the West for his video links between the USSR and the United States in the 1980s and Pozner&Donahue programs on CNBC in the 1990s, said earlier that the director general should be a man aged 40-50 with a reputation for independent views who could withstand possible pressure from the authorities.
During his tenure in 2000-2008, then Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to centralize his powers and tighten control over the media, which resulted in the four main television channels falling under government control.
When asked what Western model of public television could be applicable for Russia, Pozner said: “No model will be appropriate today because I understand that it is not welcome.”
Daniil Dondurey, chief editor of the Cinema Art magazine, who was also present at the news conference, agreed with Pozner that Russian society and the authorities were not prepared for real public television.
“Our society in all its segments is not ready for public television, nor are the political authorities or the thinking part of the civil society,” he said, adding that commercial television or the liberals would hardly support the idea either.
The Kommersant daily said on Wednesday that Andrei Bystritsky, head of the state radio company Golos Rossii, and Anatoly Lysenko, president of the International Academy of Television and Radio, were the most likely candidates for the post of director general and chief editor of the planned public television.
However, Pozner said both of them had spoken against the very idea of public television as a pointless project. “It is some kind of game,” Pozner concluded.
Mikhail Fedotov, head of the presidential council for civil society and human rights, objected that both Bystritsky and Lysenko were members of the working group for the public television project.
